Insomnia (52 page)

He paused with half the pot of beans and franks consumed. The animal in his stomach hadn’t gone back to sleep – not yet – but it had been pacified a bit. Ralph belched unselfconsciously and looked out at Harris Avenue with a feeling of contentment he hadn’t known in years. Under the current circumstances, that feeling made no sense at all, but that didn’t change it in the slightest. When was the last time he had felt this good? Maybe not since the morning he’d awakened in that barn somewhere between Derry, Maine and Poughkeepsie, NewYork, amazed by the conflicting rays of light – thousands of them, it had seemed – which crisscrossed the warm, sweet-smelling place where he lay.

Yes, or maybe never.

He spied Mrs Perrine coming up the street, probably returning from A Safe Place, the combination soup-kitchen and homeless shelter down by the canal. Ralph once again found himself fascinated by her strange, gliding walk, which she achieved without the aid of a cane and seemingly without any side-to-side movement of her hips. Her hair, still more black than gray, was now held – or perhaps subdued was the word – by the hairnet she wore on the serving line. Thick support hose the color of cotton candy rose from her spotless white nurse’s shoes . . . not that Ralph could see much of either them or the legs they covered; this evening Mrs Perrine wore a man’s wool overcoat, and the hem came almost to her ankles. She seemed to depend almost entirely on her upper legs to move her along – a sign of some chronic back problem, Ralph guessed – and this mode of locomotion, coupled with the overcoat, gave Esther Perrine a somewhat surreal aspect as she approached. She looked like the black queen on a chessboard, a piece that was either being guided by an invisible hand or moving all by itself.

As she neared the place where Ralph sat – still wearing the ripped shirt and now eating his supper directly from the pot in the bargain – the auras began to steal back into the world again. The streetlights had already come on, and now Ralph saw delicate lavender arcs hung over each. He could also see a red haze hovering above some roofs, a yellow haze above others, a pale cerise above still others. In the east, where night was now gathering itself, the horizon flocked with dim green speckles.

Closer to hand, he watched as Mrs Perrine’s aura sprang to life around her – that firm gray that reminded him of a West Point cadet’s uniform. A few darker spots, like phantom buttons, shimmered above her bosom (Ralph assumed there
was
a bosom hidden somewhere beneath the overcoat). He was not sure, but thought these might be signs of impending ill health.

‘Good evening, Mrs Perrine,’ he said politely, and watched as the words rose in front of his eyes in snowflake shapes.

She gave him a penetrating glance, flicking her eyes up and down, seeming to simultaneously sum him up and dismiss him in a single look. ‘I see you’re still wearing that same shirt, Roberts,’ she said.

What she didn’t say – but what Ralph was sure she was thinking – was
I also see you sitting there and eating beans right out of the pot, like some ragged street-person who never learned any better . . . and I have a way of
remembering
what I see, Roberts
.

‘So I am,’ Ralph said. ‘I guess I forgot to change it.’

‘Hmmp,’ said Mrs Perrine, and now he thought it was his underwear she was considering.
When was the last time it occurred to you to change that? I shudder to think, Roberts
.

‘Lovely evening, isn’t it, Mrs Perrine?’

Another of those quick, birdlike glances, this time up at the sky. Then back to Ralph. ‘It’s going to turn cold.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Oh, yes – Indian summer’s over. My back isn’t good for much besides weather forecasting these days, but at that it does very well.’ She paused. ‘I believe that’s Bill McGovern’s sweater.’

‘I guess it is,’ Ralph agreed, wondering if she would ask him next if Bill knew he had it. He wouldn’t have put it past her.

Instead, she told him to button it up. ‘You don’t want to be a candidate for pneumonia, do you?’ she asked, and the tucked set of her mouth added,
As well as for the nuthouse?

‘Absolutely not,’ Ralph said. He set the pot aside, reached for the sweater buttons, then stopped. He was still wearing a quilted stove-glove on his left hand. He hadn’t noticed it until now.

‘It will be easier if you take that off,’ Mrs Perrine said. There might have been the faintest gleam in her eyes.

‘I suppose so,’ Ralph said humbly. He shook off the glove and buttoned McGovern’s sweater.

‘My offer holds good, Roberts.’

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘My offer to mend your shirt. If you can bring yourself to part with it for a day or so, that is.’ She paused. ‘You
do
have another shirt, I assume? One you could wear while I mend the one you have on?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ralph said. ‘You bet. Quite a few of them.’

‘Choosing among them each day must be challenging for you. There’s bean juice on your chin, Roberts.’ With this pronouncement, Mrs Perrine’s eyes flicked forward and she began to march once more.

What Ralph did then he did with no forethought or understanding; it was as instinctive as the chopping gesture he had made earlier to scare Doc #3 away from Rosalie. He raised the hand which had been wearing the thermal glove and curled it into a tube around his mouth. Then he inhaled sharply, producing a faint, whispery whistle.

The results were amazing. A pencil of gray light poked out of Mrs Perrine’s aura like the quill of a porcupine. It lengthened rapidly, angling backward as the lady herself moved forward, until it had crossed the leaf-littered lawn and darted into the tube formed by Ralph’s curled fingers. He felt it enter him as he inhaled and it was like swallowing pure energy. He suddenly felt lit up, like a neon sign or the marquee of a big-city movie theater. An explosive sense of force – a feeling of
Pow!
– ran through his chest and stomach, then raced down his legs all the way to the tips of his toes. At the same time it rocketed upward into his head, threatening to blow off the top of his skull as if it were the thin concrete roof of a missile silo.

He could see rays of light, as gray as electrified fog, smoking out from between his fingers. A terrible, joyous sense of power lit up his thoughts, but only for a moment. It was followed by shame and amazed horror.

He felt his face flush. He lowered his cupped hand and shut his mouth. As his lips and teeth came together, he clearly heard – and actually
felt
– something crunch crisply inside. It was the sound you heard when you were chomping off a bite of fresh rhubarb.

Mrs Perrine stopped, and Ralph watched apprehensively as she made a half-turn and looked out at Harris Avenue.
I didn’t mean to,
he thought at her.
Honest I didn’t, Mrs P – I’m still learning my way around this thing
.

‘Roberts?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you hear something? It sounded almost like a gunshot.’

Ralph could feel his ears throbbing with hot blood as he shook his head. ‘No . . . but my ears aren’t what they—’

‘Probably just a backfire over on Kansas Street,’ she said, dismissing his weak-sister excuses out of hand. ‘It made my heart miss a beat, though, I can tell you.’

She started off again in her odd, gliding, chess-queen walk, then stopped once more and looked back at him. Her aura had begun to fade out of Ralph’s view, but he had no trouble seeing her eyes – they were as sharp as a kestrel’s.

‘You look different, Roberts,’ she said. ‘Younger, somehow.’

Ralph, who had expected something else (
Give me back what you stole, Roberts, and right this minute,
for instance), could only flounder. ‘Do you think . . . that’s very . . . I mean to say thank y—’

She flapped an impatient oh-shut-up hand at him. ‘Probably the light. I advise you not to dribble on that sweater, Roberts. My impression of Mr McGovern is that he is a man who takes care of his things.’

‘He should have taken better care of his hat,’ Ralph said.

Those bright eyes, which had begun once more to shift away from him, shifted back. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘His Panama,’ Ralph said. ‘He lost it somewhere.’

Mrs Perrine held this up to the light of her intellect for a moment, then cast it aside with another
Hmmp
. ‘Go inside, Roberts. If you stay out here much longer, you’ll catch your death of cold.’ And then she slid upon her way, not visibly the worse for wear as a result of Ralph’s thoughtless act of thievery.

‘Vampirism,’ Ralph said bleakly. He put the pot of beans aside and began to slowly rub his hands together. He felt ashamed . . . guilty . . . and all but exploding with energy.

Yes indeed. And it suddenly occurred to Ralph that this must not have been the first time he had done such a thing.

You look different, Roberts. Younger, somehow
. That was what Mrs Perrine had said tonight, but people had been making similar comments to him ever since the end of the summer, hadn’t they? The main reason his friends hadn’t hectored him into going to the doctor was because he didn’t
look
like anything was wrong with him. He complained of insomnia, but he apparently looked like the picture of health.
I guess that honeycomb must have really turned the trick,
Johnny Leydecker had said just before the two of them had left the library on Sunday – back in the Iron Age, that felt like now. And when Ralph had asked him what he was talking about, Leydecker had said he was talking about Ralph’s insomnia.
You look a gajillion times better than on the day I first met you
.

And Leydecker hadn’t been the only one. Ralph had been more or less dragging himself through the days, feeling folded, spindled, and mutilated . . . but people kept telling him how
good
he looked, how
refreshed
he looked, how
young
he looked. Helen . . . McGovern . . . even Faye Chapin had said something a week or two ago, although Ralph couldn’t remember exactly what—

‘Sure I do,’ he said in a low, dismayed voice. ‘He asked me if I was using wrinkle cream.
Wrinkle
cream, for God’s sake!’

Had he been stealing from the life-force of others even back then? Stealing without even knowing it?

‘I must have been,’ he said in that same low voice. ‘Dear Jesus, I’m a vampire.’

But was that the right word? he wondered suddenly. Wasn’t it at least possible that, in the world of auras, a life-stealer was called a Centurion?

Ed’s pallid, frantic face rose before him like a ghost which returns to accuse its murderer, and Ralph, suddenly terrified, wrapped his arms around his knees and lowered his head to rest upon them.

At twenty minutes past seven, a perfectly maintained Lincoln Town Car of late seventies vintage drew up to the curb in front of Lois’s house. Ralph – who had spent the last hour showering, shaving, and trying to get himself calmed down – stood on the porch and watched Lois get out of the back seat. Goodbyes were said and girlish, sprightly laughter drifted across to him on the breeze.

The Lincoln pulled away and Lois started up her walk. Halfway along it, she stopped and turned. For a long moment the two of them regarded each other from their opposite sides of Harris Avenue, seeing perfectly well in spite of the deepening darkness and the two hundred yards which separated them. They burned for each other in that darkness like secret torches.

Lois pointed a finger at him. It was very close to the hand gesture she’d made before shooting at Doc #3, but this didn’t upset Ralph in the least.

Intent,
he thought.
Everything lies in intent. There are few mistakes in this world . . . and once you get to know your way around, maybe there are no mistakes at all.

A narrow, gray-glistening beam of force appeared at the end of Lois’s finger and began to extend itself across the deepening shadows of Harris Avenue. A passing car drove blithely through it. The car’s windows flashed a momentary bright, blind gray and its headlights seemed to flicker briefly, but that was all.

Ralph raised his own finger, and a blue beam grew from it. These two narrowcasts of light met in the center of Harris Avenue and twined together like woodbine. Higher and higher the interwoven pigtail rose, paling slightly as it went. Then Ralph curled his finger, and his half of the love-knot in the middle of Harris Avenue winked out of existence. A moment later, Lois’s half also disappeared. Ralph slowly descended the porch steps and began to cross his lawn. Lois came toward him. They met in the middle of the street . . . where, in a very real sense, they had met already.

Ralph put his arms around her waist and kissed her.

Those words kept running through his head – recycling themselves like an endless tape-loop – as Ralph sat in Lois’s kitchen, drinking coffee. He was unable to take his eyes off her. She looked easily ten years younger and ten pounds lighter than the Lois he’d gotten used to seeing over the last few years. Had she looked this young and pretty in the park this morning? Ralph didn’t think so, but of course she had been upset this morning, upset and crying, and he supposed that made a difference.

Still . . .